There was a time when I wouldn’t have admitted to missing my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia at all. When I left I was more than happy to leave it behind for good. Louis CK’s bit about civic pride and civic rivalry articulates, in a way that I never quite could, why I don’t give a shit about where I’m from. It’s unavoidable, I suppose, to miss certain things about the place you grew up. I’ve realized that it’s this time of year in Halifax that I miss. It’s the start of a new school year (which is today, 4 September 2014). It’s the time of year when a place like Halifax — home to two good-sized universities in its downtown core alone and a total of seven post-secondary institutions city-wide — really comes into its own. During the summer the place transforms into a tourist destination, complete with groups of out-of-towners roaming the streets in sou’westers, the traditional headwear of my people.* In winter, long after the lucrative tourists have all gone, the place is a slushy hellhole I wouldn’t wish on The Tragically Hip. The sweet spot is between the last week of August and the middle of September. That’s when the bright-eyed students descend upon the city, move into old houses with couches on the porch, and take the place off its summer life support.

As an undergraduate, I loved being in the thick of it. Everything seemed so fresh and revivified. I’m certain my experience was largely different from the many thousands of students coming from out of town. For starters, I had lived there my whole life so there was no sense of discovering a new place. I was also older than most college seniors when I started university, so I was only ever a part of that culture in an anthropological sense. Nevertheless, the mixture of youthful vigor, fall colours and smells, and the promise of admission to the rarefied world of academia all concentrated on one tiny peninsula coalesced into a feeling I’ve never experienced with other post-secondary locations. After the golden period ended, however, it was always business as usual.

*”my people” = tour operators willing to exploit the idea that everyone in Atlantic Canada are villagey red-headed fishermen, directly descended from villagey fishermen from the old country.

I had the pleasure of speaking via Skype to Eva Lantsoght, a civil engineer who was awarded her PhD in June 2013, about all sorts of things relating to the academic experience. I spoke to her from my home in Whitehorse, Yukon to hers in Quito, Ecuador where she has accepted a full-time assistant professorship in the engineering department. After a couple of false starts thanks to a storm system heading through her area of Ecuador, we got going and covered a number of topics of serious interest to academics, both up-and-coming and seasoned, as well as grad students. Among the topics we covered were her own research and teaching, the transition from student to professor, variations in funding systems worldwide, and the importance of becoming independent as an academic.

What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. I think you will enjoy hearing what Eva has to say in sharing her experiences and knowledge as an international academic. If you’d like to read more, you can visit Eva’s top-notch blog PhD Talk on grad school, academia, and beyond.

What is your background and what are you working on at the moment in your research and lecturing?

My topic is structural concrete and I’m looking at not so much the material or the composition of the material, my PhD research was applied to concrete bridges. We looked at what are called slab bridges in the Netherlands, which were mostly built in the 1950s and 1960s and designed for 50 – 60 years of service. I tested the strength of the slabs together with the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment to determine the capacity of the bridges to determine whether they could remain in service, also taking into account the increased volumes and intensity of traffic over the decades. I worked with the ministry on a spreadsheet containing over 600 of these bridges to provide an overview on which ones need maintenance first, which is what I’ve been working on since this past summer in addition to working on trying to get my journal papers from my dissertation published as well as teaching at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ).

You’re splitting your time between research at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a full-time assistant professorship at USFQ in Quito. Who and what do you teach during the academic year at USFQ?

I teach Reinforced Concrete 1 and Reinforced Concrete 2 and Design of Pavements Concrete 1 is a fourth year course of a five year undergraduate program; there is no master’s program yet, but we are hoping to develop something for 2015 or 2016. The other two courses are fifth year courses for students in that final year.

Is your teaching a tenure-track position and will that necessitate you travelling back and forth from Ecuador to the Netherlands throughout your career?

Well, what’s new in Ecuador is that tenure-track is written into the law so, as of now, and what my job description says is that I’m on equal footing with other professors, but the new law – passed in November, I think – has three levels of professorship with certain requirements to move up through associate, assistant, and full professor. The Ecuadorian government is trying to make the university system a little more uniform. I have an agreement with Delft for two years and I’m going to see how practical that is and if it works out, I’d like to keep my ties with Delft because it is so interesting for my research because the Civil Engineering and Geosciences department is so much bigger and they have about seven staff members and nine other PhD researchers who specialize in structural concrete, where as USFQ does not have a department that large.

Is USFQ building their engineering department?

Yes, I’m looking to put together a lab to start doing the experiments students are required to do in their first years of engineering, which they are currently doing in other universities with labs. If the master’s program comes they’ll also need to hire more people. In terms of my own research, I am the only person in my department specifically doing research on structural concrete, so it’s not the same as being in Delft working with people who’ve been working on this topic their entire careers with the giant lab facilities on hand.

As you know, the tenure-track and the number of adjuncts in North American universities is a bit of a hot button issue right now, so is the Ecuadorian model of government intervention in securing tenured professors a model that seems to be working or is it a bit of an experiment?

The first thing I would point out is that the Ecuadorian president is a former academic, so he’s been putting a lot of focus on higher education in terms of giving a lot of scholarships to students for study abroad for their master’s and PhDs with the requirement that they come back. And there are now requirements at universities that state 70% of professors must hold a PhD by 2017. In the past it was mostly people with master’s who taught at universities, so there has been a push to hire people with PhDs to fulfill these requirements. Prior to these interventions by the government into tenure-track and scholarships, it was the case that if you had money and space anyone could build a university without any requirements or accreditation. It was a way to quickly make money from people seeking degrees rather than providing an academically rigorous environment. So, it’s better now because there is a university rating system which goes from A to D; if an institution is at D, they have one year to improve and move up to category C. If they stay as a ‘D’ institution, they close it down. USFQ is one of the few universities – and the only private university – in Ecuador with an A rating.

That sounds similar to the private for-profit colleges in North America, which target mostly international students who are trying to get into ‘A’ level Canadian and American universities.

The system is different again where I’m from in Belgium, where there are almost no private universities and the public universities are regarded as higher quality because there is an accreditation system in place.

What’s been your experience moving around for your degrees, research, and jobs affected you as an academic? Does it make you a better candidate in the eyes of, say, hiring committees?

Moving around between degrees, as I did, always slows you down a bit because you have to adjust to the new place and perhaps make up certain requirements but, in terms of learning experiences, for me it was very good. I first studied in Belgium which has a system that’s very similar to the French system of teaching engineering – starting from mathematical principles and then derive everything from that until you reach the design of your building or bridge – which is very different from the American system where you first learn to design structures and then you can dig deeper into the mechanics of the structure. Many engineering students in America don’t take classes such as ContinuumMechanics, which covers the mechanics of our structures, whereas in Belgium this is where we start. This has given me an advantage in some fields because I can understand the mathematical concepts, but I don’t have the same feeling for the design. I learned this when I studied in the Netherlands because they are very practical or ‘engineery,’ as I call it, where they may not necessarily have all the ‘science’ of a structure right but they have more of a ‘feeling’ for it, which I had to adjust to, but overall as a learning experience it was good. In terms of travelling during my PhD, I travelled a lot for conferences. I had been hoping to travel to spend some time in different labs, but I never got the chance to do this because I was working full-time in my university’s laboratory trying to finish all my experiments so this did not leave any time to travel for this. I was fortunate in that, as part of my PhD funding, there was money for travel to conferences provided I was presenting a paper that would be published in the conference proceedings. In 2013 alone I went to 7 conferences on all continents, which was really helpful because this allowed me to show people what I had done and to spread the word about my work as I am also trying to get my thesis published. It was very tiring because, for example, I had a conference in Japan, followed by another one in Pittsburgh, and then, a week after that I had my thesis defense!

Was there a limit to the amount of funding you could access during your PhD for conferences, providing you met the criterion that your paper would be published in the proceedings?

I must say, Delft was very good in terms of funding. I had always been granted travel permission by the university so long as it was within my project’s budget. I had to keep all my receipts to get reimbursed for travel expenses.

That’s a very different model of conference funding than we’re used to here! PhD students, in my experience, have to choose their conferences extremely carefully because of the lack of sufficient funding. We end up paying out of our own pocket for a lot of things. So, as a followup, based on your experience have you ever been to a conference that seemed like more of a vacation than an academic gathering? For instance, I get a CFP every year for this vaguely worded conference in Hawaii that seems to highlight the beach and the pool more so than the content. Does it do any harm to go to a conference if you’re uncertain about the academics?

I haven’t gone to any of those conferences, but I’ve been to some that are remotely related to my field. For instance, I went to a conference on sustainability and I wasn’t sure how my work would fit in there, but my supervisor encouraged me to go. Most of the conferences I go to are organized by the big concrete associations in my field. Even though I haven’t been to any ‘destination’ conferences, I’ve ended up going to great destinations like Israel, South Africa, Japan, and Australia anyway.

How did it help you to be out of your comfort zone by, for instance, going to that conference your supervisor had recommended?

At the sustainability conference I went to, it was a little difficult for me to follow because many of the presentations were about materials whereas my research is largely design-based. It was a great learning experience, however, because it gave me another perspective on my own work and my presentation was from a different angle than I usually do because it was about the sustainability of preserving existing bridges.

Are these conferences all conducted in English?

Yes, with the exception of a few national gatherings in the Netherlands where the proceedings were presented in Dutch.

It seems that any research conducted in non-English languages is given less value in the unilingual (English-speaking) world. Have you encountered any stigma about conducting and presenting research in other languages?

In my field, German is still relatively important. There’s a very good German journal in my field; I’m planning to submit a paper to that journal and I will need a translator to help me with that because my German is not good enough to write a technical paper myself. Most people in the German universities still publish largely in German and that, of course, doesn’t make it to most of the rest of the world. I’ve published a paper in a Dutch industrial journal that has a lot of local readers, which was very good for me, but in terms of my profile as a researcher it is the English publications that take up most of my energy and writing effort. And because English isn’t my first language, it’s sometimes a struggle. When I got reviews back for my first paper the reviewers had said there was a problem with my English and the recommended an English proofreader to help with the language. My professor suggested that he would fix the English. In other universities, it is common practice to send papers to a native speaker for correction before submitting it to journals.

In European academia, is it more common or acceptable to publish something in a language other than English?

In my own work, I have used French papers in my research in order to target certain researchers. In terms of other languages – apart from German – I wouldn’t really think to publish in any other language. Even in the Dutch journal I discussed earlier, the researchers will write a longer paper for a peer-reviewed English journal and there will be a little note referring the reader to the ‘full’ paper in the reference list, which is kind of like ‘If you want to read the real paper you can find it in this particular journal’ so the English journal is still given preference.

It’s difficult to reach the right audience if you don’t publish in English. I’ve worked with a supervisor who has great personal contacts all over Europe and I know people who have gained access to lots of work from non-English labs but that wouldn’t have happened if not for that professor’s personal contacts.

In your non-peer-reviewed writing – blogs, Gradhacker – how crucial is it that academics, and particularly younger academics, have this sort of profile? And, in terms of online presence for academics, is there any forum that you wouldn’t give up?

If I had to give up all of my online writing the one I would keep would be my blog because of all the work and time I’ve spent working on it. It’s got a lot of foundational work on there. Even though I get a lot out of chatting on Twitter, the blog is much more in-depth.

How crucial is it to keep personal and professional online presences separate for academics? Has your online presence had any impact in terms of gaining the notice of the academic gatekeepers (hiring committees, journal editors, etc)?

As for the hiring here at USFQ it has been a huge benefit. I was hired by one of the owners of the university and he wants me to look into setting up a social media in Engineering course because he values that interaction very highly. When I was at Delft, the marketing and communications people there contacted me and have used me in some marketing for the university. In those terms, I have felt that both institutions have appreciated my online efforts. Sometimes others will cast a bit of doubt about whether blogging or maintaining an online presence is really worth it. I’ve also learned some great skills from online connections. Once I needed to make a poster project so I put the word out to #phdchat on Twitter and lots of people responded to me with resources that helped me turn out a decent poster. Also, in preparing for my TEDtalk I had reached out to companies like Lafarge, which is the manufacturer of high-strength concrete, for pictures to use in my presentation.

I don’t think people should be forced into taking part in professionalized social media if they don’t want to.

What is the most important thing that you’ve taken away from the PhD process since coming through the other side of it?

I’ve become very independent. The professor I was working with actually retired during my PhD and he was somebody who travelled extensively throughout the academic year so he was often not present in the Netherlands. This meant that most of the time I was largely on my own. In the beginning I would wait on his stamp of approval for everything but after a while I came to the realization that this was my project and I took ownership over it. There were no real rules at Delft about the supervisory relationship. They used to practice the ‘mushroom technique’ which would mean putting a student in a dark room for three years and then at the end opening the door and seeing if they were ready. My daily supervisor and I had a relationship where he would send me to conferences to make a presentation that he was unable to do because he trusted that I could do it.

So that ends the first of my series of academic profiles. I urge you to check out Eva’s blog PhDTalk where you can learn more about her research and CV.

“Being geographically unplugged from one’s academic friends/community is difficult, especially in a place that has no alternative.”

The above was a tweet I made on 2 January. It was the first time I had actually written that thought. Of course, I had thought that thought, but it never really had as great an impact as the split second after I saw it in black and white. Let me give a bit of background before I continue.

If you’re new to Graduable.com, my story is that I am doing a PhD at UBC in Vancouver (hooray for me). However, I haven’t really lived in Vancouver for the duration of it. For the first two years I lived on Vancouver Island and commuted a couple of times per week to fulfill class and teaching obligations. It was a pain in the ass getting there and back on public transit, but I did it and I usually liked not living in Vancouver as I prefer Victoria in a lot of ways anyhow. This previous summer I moved to Whitehorse, Yukon because who doesn’t love a challenge, right? I knew that doing a PhD that far from my home institution was going to be tricky, but others are doing it/have done it.

Obviously, Yukon, with its population of 30,000, is not the post-secondary Mecca that Vancouver is but I had brought a lot of materials with me and, besides, most of my work exists solely in my head and on my hard drive. The paucity of academic resources did not and does not bother me, although I do miss the option of hanging out at UBC’s libraries, thumbing the stacks (especially playing with those hand-cranked shelves in the basement), and being something of an academic vampire — keeping myself young by feasting on the stress and fear shed by undergraduates frantically studying or working on assignments.*

What I find I am lacking is any kind of connection with my academic circle. I am grateful for social media, namely Twitter, for helping me keep one foot in the academic world, but this is only good to an extent. What I have been struggling with is the geographical distance between me and my physical support networks. That is, I have wonderful conversations from afar with those I consider friends as well as colleagues, though it isn’t the same as meeting in a cafe where the conversation might begin on a scholarly topic but transforms and transmogrifies into myriad other things before coming back around — usually — to the topic at hand. I think this is the art of conversation that many lament the loss of and it is one of my favourite things.

With the solitude that is the PhD, sometimes a rowdy tête-à-tête is required and no electronic form of communication that I know of can reproduce the natural progressions of an in person conversation. This does not mean I don’t have intense conversations, just that I don’t/can’t have them with the people who can challenge me in all the ways I need to be challenged. I get lots of opportunities to explain my research to disinterested parties whose backgrounds are wholly dissimilar to mine and I find this important. As academics, we really need to hone the skill of explaining what it is we’re doing to non-experts in the most concise way possible. There’s no shortage of criticism out there and we need to allow ourselves to be able to respond to the entire spectrum.

The above mentioned solitude is necessary for any kind of serious study. When it turns into loneliness, however, that’s a problem. I don’t think we talk enough about how lonely and isolating this process really is. Even with the perfect mix of academic community and resources, I still feel that loneliness and isolation would pervade the PhD process; it is an inbuilt feature of working on such narrow topics in order to gain expertise. That’s a great paradox of this life choice: the emotional abuse you put yourself through in order to become an expert in a topic almost nobody cares about, except you, of course, and that’s really why you’re doing it. For every negative feeling — isolation, loneliness, diffidence — there is always the reminder that this is a selfish pursuit. Hedonistic even.

So, what am I doing to overcome these little hurdles? Luckily, we have a small college here in Whitehorse and I instruct one course per semester. These are university level English courses so it keeps my pedagogical mind sharp and looks great on my CV. I am also putting in some time at the college’s writing centre in an attempt to integrate myself a little more fully into the small academic community of Whitehorse. I also try and look forward to the little milestones of my program. I just passed one and have another coming up in the next month or so. As a bonus, these milestones usually mean I get to travel back to Vancouver, which is always a brain and energy boost. The long dark winter here means that I often succumb to cabin fever and, most days, the only other beings I talk to are dogs. They have not yet begun talking back. I think that would propel me to another level entirely, one in which I would begin questioning myself a little more thoroughly. Or, perhaps, I’d just go with the flow and do whatever the dogs told me to. Not quite there yet. Thanks for reading. Woof.

Here’s a great post by The Thesis Whisperer on the loneliness of PhDing. It touches on more points than I have here and also has some great links and discussion below.

*Side note: there is a painting of me in an attic somewhere rapidly aging when I do this.

Many, if not all, of my posts have a bias toward grad school, being a grad student, and various issues that arise around grad studentness (like avoiding being an asshole). This got me to thinking that I was neglecting the portion of the university population that is perhaps even more confused than grad students. After all, the majority of new matriculations to any university will be undergraduates. So, from my own experience and some help from Twitter friends, I present to you the following list, which is by no means exhaustive, in number form. I have also attached gifs of kitties to each one because I am trying desperately to look hip.

1. You Are Not in High School Anymore

This should be obvious on your first day since I doubt your high school had a bar. There are other important differences, however, between university and high school. The first and most important is the academic expectations. Let’s say you were some sort of academic hotshot in high school — straight A’s, teachers’ prized possession, blah, blah, blah — well, you’re starting from square one in university. Nobody knows you or your reputation, nor do they care. Your achievements in high school got you into the school and that’s where high school stopped being useful for you. Many students can be overwhelmed by the workload, especially in conjunction with all the other things that occupy your time, during the first semester of university. Your best bet is to do the work to the best of your ability. That means showing up for lecture and/or tutorial (every time!) prepared and ready to listen, understand, and contribute; doing the required assignments on time, unless you have a really damn good excuse (a rarity); and asking for help. Profs will not keep track of you like Mrs. Scofield did. It’s not that they don’t care about your education, on the contrary, they care deeply about your education, but you are a friggin’ adult and they’re too busy to track down each of their hundreds of students for a little feelings session. Your profs and TAs have office hours so that you can go and talk to them. The students who do this will, in my experience, generally be the ones who do better or improve throughout the term.

2. Get Involved. Or Don’t.

During the first week of university there are all sorts of ad hoc events, activities, and clubs for you to join. Chief among these, I’ve been told by movies, are fraternities and sororities. It’s up to you whether you want to join in with any of these things. Maybe you’re the kind of person who likes that sort of thing. I am not the kind of person who gets involved with things and I really didn’t during undergrad. I mean, I tried some things, but I just had zero interest in anything other than doing well in classes. This could have been due to my starting university a bit later than most of my friends (I was 22). It’s entirely up to you what you do and don’t join. The advice here is, though, if your extra-curricular activities are impacting your studies negatively, the choice of which one to let go should be easily apparent. If it’s not apparent, let me spell it out for you: drop the extra-curricular activities and focus on your coursework.

3. Enjoy it. It Won’t Last.

This is good advice from a recent grad of my alma mater. So, yeah, university is supposed to be fun as well as educational. It prolongs the period between you and the so-called real world while, ideally, making you a better person than you were before. That last bit about loving what you learn. Damn. Just, yes. This means that you’re allowed to switch majors if you hate what you started out doing. Don’t do a degree in something you hate just because someone told you to or you think it will guarantee you a job or whatever (note: no university degree comes with the guarantee of a job). Whatever you do, enjoy it and get the most out of it. There will likely never be another time in your life that affords you this much freedom to pursue your own interests. Go ahead, take that dinosaur class. You know you want to.

Again, I mentioned this above and its importance cannot be overstated. These people are the gatekeepers to your doing well in your courses. They really care that you do well. What they really don’t care about, though, is your excuses for why you didn’t do something and they will not chase you around for missing assignments. They are (or should be) available to talk with you either during their allotted office hours or at another time. Most profs and TAs I know are usually happy to arrange other meeting times if their office hours don’t fit your schedule. But, please, give plenty of notice. Don’t email a prof or TA as if you are on instant messenger. They’re not your friend, keep a professional distance and tone. So, now that you’ve decided to meet with your prof or TA, what do you say to them? Well, that’s up to you. You might meet with them early on in the semester just to introduce yourself or to discuss some aspects of the syllabus that you foresee yourself having trouble with or need clarification on. I recommend a meeting early on before any real problems arise. That way you’ve established a bit of a rapport that will come in handy when you have a pressing issue so you can get straight to business and avoid awkward small talk when you next come. I can tell you from my many lonesome office hours that they are not utilized to their fullest extent by many students. When a student did come to discuss something with me, I usually saw an improvement in that student. Was it something I did? No, not really. It was mostly the students who improved themselves because now they saw concepts or course material a little more clearly than before. Here’s a not-catchy-at-all slogan I just invented: office hours help get A’s.

Check back for the exciting conclusion of this post. I’ll also be doing a tl;dr version because who has time to read anything anymore? Amirite?

Before I begin to enthrall you with my seemingly airtight and omniscient methods for reading novels for academic purposes I have one small, but important, word of discretion. This is how I read novels for academic purposes. Because I’m an English literature scholar I’d say that I have some experience in this regard, but mine is not the only way to do it. That being said, I suppose the audience for this post is more likely an undergraduate who is encountering using novels for academic things for the first time. Indeed, the inspiration for this post came from a recent first-year class I held and I hope I do a better job of explaining myself here than I did on that day.

You may recall my other reading posts, How to Read Academic Books Part 1 and Part 2. I’m looking to do the same sort of thing here, except this isn’t about reading academic books per se, but rather reading novels for an academic purpose. This ain’t your mama’s book club I’m talking about here, although that does seem like it would be a hoot.

First of all, reading a novel for an academic purpose likely means one of two things:
1) it is on the syllabus for a course you’re taking, or
2) you’re reading for your qualifying exams or dissertation*
Either way, you need to take into account a bunch of stuff that normal people who read for fun would never have to think of. I would usually say about other kinds of texts that you should take into account what’s on the cover, its layout, font, etc but novels are a funny thing. There seems to me to be different rules when it comes to assessing the physicality of a novel over, say, a theory text. I usually don’t pay as much attention to the packaging of the book if what I’m reading is a modern reprint of a classic since most of what I care about is what’s inside. However, if I’m reading a new(ish) novel or one whose author is still alive and not out of copyright, I tend to pay much closer attention to that detail. The following is my favourite example.

This is a cover for Anne of Green Gables (1908), the LM Montgomery classic that is dear to my people (but not me personally. I couldn’t care less about Anne, having been subjected to summers of, what I’m going to call, Annundation on family trips). This cover caused quite a stir earlier this year when it was released and I am using it to illustrate how you can’t really say much about an older novel based on the cover. Montgomery’s been dead since 1942 and the novel itself is over 100 years old. Unless one is doing a study of contemporary print culture representations of Anne Shirley, the above cover probably won’t factor much into your study of the novel itself.

On the other hand, when looking at a newer novel I take the cover into much broader consideration of the work as a whole. I’ve chosen Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) to illustrate what I mean.

The above covers are not the only ones ever released for the book, though they are likely the most common. I would make the argument that the covers and the physicality of a novel such as this matters more to the study of what is inside than the above mentioned Anne cover. While you still ought not to necessarily judge the book by its cover, I would say one ought to at least take it into consideration, depending on what it is you want to say about the novel.

So, after you’ve had a good look at the outside of the novel, what do you do? I always tell students to read the introductory notes if there are any. The purpose of this is twofold: 1) it places the book in a context the student may not be familiar with (in addition to giving some insight into a bunch of factors to do with the novel, such as an author’s biography), and 2) it will sometimes spoil the plot. Why would I want to spoil the plot of something I’m about to read? Well, because when reading for academic purposes, plot is a secondary concern. ‘Spoiler Alert’ is a bullshit term that should never be uttered in an academic context. I encourage you to spoil the ending for yourself and others because then you can look beyond it and focus on what’s important. Maybe I ought to temper this advice with a warning to not spoil plots outside of academia; that just makes you a jerk.

Speaking of which, what is important when reading novels for academic purposes? The short, though unhelpful, answer is that everything is important. All you need to do is take a look at any scholarly edition of a novel and read the supplementary materials to see that everything means something. Some of the best examples of these kinds of editions are from the Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. For instance, their edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula(1897) has essays exploring gender criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, and deconstruction in addition to various contextual materials. What this added material shows is that there are many ways of reading, approaching, and critiquing any work. It does not mean that you will necessarily be expected to be the expert in all or any of these methods of critical analysis, though it is helpful to consider the novel’s various layers. To this end, make notes about the text you are reading; there are many methods for doing so. I personally like to mark directly in the book’s margins (if I own the book, of course) so that I create something of a second or concurrent text/conversation with the author, narrator, or characters. I look for repetition and things that might be important to understanding something specific about a text. I try to answer the question of the novel’s purpose and what problems it arouses and solves and why. Does the novel say anything about the context in which it was written? How would it have been received when it was first released? What has been its reception since? How does it relate to other works of the same genre/period/medium/etc?

These are just a few of the questions I keep in mind when reading novels for academic purposes. I am totally leaving out a bunch of stuff and I will update this post or add others as I think of things I have forgotten. I also encourage you, oh wise blog reader, to add to this woefully partial list I have provided. I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate that my way is not the only or definitive way of reading novels in an academic setting.

*There is a secret third option here and that is you have studied literature for so long that everything you read is read for academic purposes. You cannot switch it off. Somebody, please make it stop!

You can clearly see the symbolism in that bag of potato chips. If you can’t, my chips are Victorian pornography-flavoured.

A few weeks ago, November 26 to be precise, I was scheduled to share my research with a group of peers in an informal setting known in the UBC English Department as the Work in Progress (WiP) series. This weekly series is organized by fellow PhD student and TA Michael Stewart who blogs, by the way, over at Rabble. These talks are accompanied by coffee and tea (bring your own mug) and the audience is mostly other grad students, though all are welcome. I found it especially useful because of three big reasons (and many smaller ones).

1) As far as I know, I am the only graduate student in my department who studies Victorian pornography which makes me something of the expert in the room. This is always a good feeling.
2) Sharing your research with a general academic audience is helpful in ways you would not believe.
3) Sharing your research in a no pressure setting is also helpful in ways you would not believe.

Now, the first reason above makes me sound like a bit of a snob. I assure you this is only kind of the case. As PhD students, it is our job to become an expert in something. I have chosen Victorian pornography as my area of subspecialty expertise (Victorian literature being my general specialty) and I, in turn, am researching that area in all sorts of ways. Back to the snob thing – I’m sure that every PhD student has come off in this way at one point or another. I’m sure that some PhD students are actually snobs. The thing about covert snobbery is that someone who is not yet an expert in something can sometimes overcompensate for their lack of knowledge by being snobbish. I’ve done this in the past and knew it was wrong when I was doing it. I wasn’t being a complete dick or anything, just making it seem like I knew more than I did so as to save face. I have learned, however, that it is much more respectable sometimes to admit you don’t know. So, now, I will say “I don’t know” if I don’t know something and I usually follow that up with “But it is something I will/should/want to look more into”.

The second reason above is really important because not everyone is an expert in what you do, obviously. The audience for my talk came from all sorts of backgrounds and they asked questions that I was not unprepared for, but which challenged me in ways I was not used to. You will also get this in the proper academic conference presentation but what was nice about these questions was that I did not get one of those questions that runs something like this: “When you talk about Victorian pornography, have you ever considered my research and expertise [in a totally unrelated period and field]?” No, instead I got thoughtful questions that helped me to think about my project and research in new ways that I otherwise would not have. It’s important that your research is accessible to a general audience and you won’t be able to gauge this if you only ever present it to other experts.

Lastly, the no pressure setting is something you should always take advantage of if you can. This is especially helpful if you are able to do it in a safe place like your home department; it’s great practice for the big leagues of academic conferences, oral defenses, and, if you’re one of the chosen few, job interviews. Low stakes presentations will never be useless to you, your research, or others taking part. My only regret is that I was unable to go to more of these presentations during the semester.

I am attaching the presentation I gave on the day in question. It has some notes that I made prior to and after the presentation written in blue. Take note that the bulk of my presentation comes directly from my qualifying papers list project description.

It occurred to me a little while ago that we academics sometimes get caught up in the minutiae of literary theory, analysis, and our own sense of what texts do. To that end, I decided to go back to basics and found myself a good old-fashioned school book report proforma with which to review Lytton’s hollow Earth novel The Coming Race. So, here it is. Enjoy.

This is a simple book report I found online and printed out. Along with the surface reading techniques that it espouses, it also reminded me that almost nobody writes things like this by hand anymore. It felt kind of liberating to do that.

Even though the assignment didn’t ask for it, I thought I might illustrate a scene from the book to show potential readers how exciting the book was.

Like this:

If you are one of the many millions of students in North America, you know that the end of August is nigh and that magical last hurrah known as Labour Day (or Labor Day stateside) changes everything. I, for one, cannot wait for it to come around again because I don’t remember a time when my motivation was this low. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I had my motivation levels checked this time last year and they were actually just as low. So, what to do about this? Well, I’ve tried moping, groaning, and watching an endless stream of Storage Wars (not the Texas one, though. What a crappier show that is) but nothing seems to be working. Seems to me that the best thing for this particular malady is to get back on campus, donning my finest argyle sweater vest and khakis, and savour the sights, smells, and sounds of a new academic year. Yes, this yearly ritual is enough to get even the most spoiled and entitled school children out of the inevitable ennui that comes with a solid two month chunk of vacation. It works for their teachers too (zing!).

Yes, I love rocking up to the English department to see all the new graduate students, all eager with their heads overflowing with ideas and things to be read, discussed, and deconstructed while battle-hardened and curmudgeonly veterans like me gain sustenance from their youth and vigour not unlike some Victorian vampire minus the old (or any) money (let me know if you can think of that vampire’s name. It’s something like Drake or Count Chocula). Yes, fresh inspired minds are just what I need to surround myself with to get back to the real work of academia and reading lists and lit reviews and teaching. Oh, I forgot about teaching. Nothing is more invigorating than walking into the undergraduate classroom, master of all you survey, font of all knowledge. It really is an invincible feeling, just the kind of motivation I need to kick me in the behind and get me back to focusing on things that are important.

So, as I sit here wiling away the final days of what was a thoroughly excellent summer, I feel a little torn by the fact that I can’t wait for it to end already. By the same token, however, it has not been good for me to have spent so much time in solitude with little contact with other humans. I welcome the chance to inhale the intoxicating mixture of cool decaying foliage, fresh earth, and office supplies that signals the fact that school’s in. Well, that and my new Jonas Brothers backpack.